Women in Translation Month: Books by Women That Have Won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

This year, as a contribution to Women in Translation Month, created by Meytal Radzinski in 2014, the PEN America Translation Committee presents a series of blog posts featuring books written by women that have won the PEN Translation Prize and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, as well as books by female authors that were
published after having received a PEN/Heim
Translation Fund grant.

These works of literature have been judged to represent the finest writing by women worldwide, brought into English—from Russian, French, Polish, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Spanish, Pashto, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, German, Lithuanian, Swedish, Korean, Italian, and Chinese—by the most skillful translators in the field. The fact that PEN America’s translation prizes have gone disproportionately to books by men over the years illustrates the problem that Radzinski identified in December 2013, when she first noticed, and documented, as she later put it, “this startling skew.”

Click here for an account of how Women in Translation Month came into being, and a look at some of the efforts aimed at getting more female authors translated into English and more people reading them. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow the conversation at #womenintranslation and #WITMonth. Also visit Women in Translation, a Tumblr I cofounded with Margaret Carson, where daily updates will be posted throughout August.

We hope you’ll be inspired by these lists of great books to pick some of them up and read them this month—and keep on reading women in translation in all the months to come!

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On Thursday, Hong Kong’s legislature approved a contentious bill that makes it illegal to insult the Chinese national anthem. The legislation was approved after pro-democracy opposition lawmakers tried to disrupt the vote. Learn more about it here: https://bit.ly/2UaZ0fj

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https://bit.ly/2XZo7TA.

"I've seen dictators rise and fall. Beware, America." Novelist and former PEN America president @SalmanRushdie writes about his experience seeing dictatorships succeed and crumble, and what these lessons offer America right now in the midst of chaos. https://wapo.st/3eUcggt